Curious Thought About Dynamite’s Van Lente Announcement

It is always interesting to see what items are or are not included in a creator’s resume when they are announced by a publisher. On the one hand. the publisher wants to create hype for the project by tying the creator to popular work he or she has already done. However, if that work was done for another publisher it becomes a delicate balancing act of hyping the creator without drawing too much attention to the other company. this can lead to some interesting additions or omissions.

At the bottom of Dynamite’s announcement of signing Fred Van Lente to write a zombie title for them, there was a brief bio of Van lente with some of his previous work:

Fred Van Lente is an American writer, primarily of comic books and graphic novels. Van Lente is the co-founder, along with artist Ryan Dunlavey, of Evil Twin Comics, which produces his and Dunlavey’s non-fiction comic books, the first and most famous of which is Action Philosophers. Recent work includes becoming the ongoing co-author of Incredible Hercules with Greg Pak, as well as writing Marvel Zombies 3 and Marvel Zombies 4. with Kev Walker and X-Men Noir with Dennis Calero. Upcoming work includes two one-shots as part of Marvel Zombies Return. He also wrote the first issue of Deadpool Team-Up (number #899 as it was counting backwards from the #900 special). Van Lente created a new Power Man, Victor Alvarez, who first appeared in the Shadowland: Power Man mini-series, then in a new Power Man and Iron Fist series, also by Van Lente.

So, his independent/self-published work? Check. Incredible Hercules? Check. Marvel Zombies? (Well, the new title will be a zombie tale, so it makes sense to include that). Check. But the inclusion of the new Powerman and Iron Fist series? Huh? What’s up with that? Why include a series which not even Marvel remembers he created? And where is his current work for Archer and Armstrong? You know, the highly rated and very popular series he is writing for Valiant. but, then again, Valiant does compete head-to-head with Dynamite in the smaller publisher realm.

As I said, the inclusion and exclusion of projects can be pretty interesting.